Monday, March 30, 2009

So I'm in Knoxville for the week, with 500 colleagues (it should have been about 550, but the DNS decided not to get their act together and forced quite a few speakers to stay home -- more on that later). The conference is called "Quark Matter 2009", and is the 21st in a series that began in the early 1980's. This time the folks at Oak Ridge took the reins, and we're in for a busy week.

I particularly like the poster this time out: the Great Smoky Mountains, Helvetica everywhere, and the central cluster of stars from the Tennessee state flag, which iconographically refers to the three quarks in the proton, but really refers to the three regions of Tennessee. It's pretty neat that the flag even has a Sol Lewitt style set of instructions associated with it:

An oblong flag or banner in length one and two thirds times its width, the large or principal field of same to be of color red, but said flag or banner ending at its free or outer end in a perpendicular bar of blue, of uniform width, running from side to side; that is to say, from top to bottom of said flag or banner, and separated from the red field by a narrow margin or stripe of white of uniform width; the width of the white stripe to be one-fifth that of the blue bar; and the total width of the bar and stripe together to be equal to one-eighth of the width of the flag.

In the center of the red field shall be a smaller circular field of blue, separated from the surrounding red field by a circular margin or stripe of white of uniform width and of the same width as the straight margin or stripe first mentioned. The breadth or diameter of the circular blue field, exclusive of the white margin, shall be equal to one-half of the width of the flag. Inside the circular blue field shall be three five-pointed stars of white distributed at equal intervals around a point, the center of the blue field and of such size and arrangement that one point of each star shall approach as closely as practicable without actually touching one point of each of the other two around the center point of the field; and the two outer points of each star shall approach as nearly as practicable without actually touching the periphery of the blue field. The arrangement of the three stars shall be such that the centers of no two stars shall be in a line parallel to either the side or end of the flag, but intermediate between same; and the highest star shall be the one nearest the upper confined corner of the flag.

Monday, March 23, 2009

(Funny, my photo is similar to the Times one -- maybe because Revkin was standing next to me!)

Gee I barely had time to introduce this post. Steven Chu, our new Energy Secretary, chose to come to BNL today to announce a major round of funding for science, particularly for the national laboratories. I popped open the new netbook and didn't stop typing for 45 minutes, throughout what turned out to be a quite substantive talk. Enjoy the notes (as raw as they are!):

OK, the first slide is up: "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and America's renewed commitment to scientific research"

Cue Billy Joel muzak again, as with Paterson.

First visit of DOE secretary to a national research lab. Visited facilities and scientists.

He has chosen BNL to make an important funding announcment which will affect science across the US.

Bishop speaking. Honored Secretary has chosen BNL as first lab since being appointed. "Underscores just what a treasure this laboratory is." Announcement will reflect wisdom of recovery act. Puts people back to work, and puts them where the US will lead.

Chu speaking. Grew up in Garden City, Long Island, age 3 to 18. Never made it to Stony Brook (laughter).

There's going to be an announcment, and then "you're going to be subjected to a brief real talk"

Announcement: Obama's budget pledges to double office of science over the next 10 years. Calls for $15B per year into R&D for clean, renewable energy. Extends REsearch and experimentation tax credit for companies.

Major contributions will be at the "Energy Frontier" (different than usual -- "energy" not "high energy"!)

"The Energy Problem": 1. national security and prospertiy linked to energy, 2. potential for geopolitical conflict from competition for resources, 3. climate change

Reviewing predictions for loss of forests and snowpack and heatwave mortality.

Death of British Columbian pine by 2013 since beetles not killed by frost. 40% already dead by 2006.

Permafrost less permanent.

Issue is preserving vegetation: microbes create lots of CO2 when they don't freeze

Human development index vs Electricity Use. US is highly developed (HDI of 0.95) but no correlation with electricity consumption. Canada and Norway much higher but due to hydro resources.

Showing per capita electricity use: flat in CA since 1973 despite GDP per capita doubling, grew 50%+ nationwide. NYS is 2nd best state in union.

Discussing development of refrigerators since 70's. Energy down by 4, cost by factor of 2-3. Energy saved by better fridges is double than all of renewable energy. One cannot stress how important energy efficiency is.

Buildings are 40% of total US energy. Lighting in commerical buildings is 26% of energy use. Huge opportunities for energy saving.

Experience from time at LBNL on making buildings efficient. Turns out lots of physics problems in helping architects and engineers to design better buildings. Can reduce consumption by 80% -- pays for itself in 10 years.

3 myths: one is that it's just political will. no it requires technology.

what is a transformative technology? electronic amplification and transcontinental telephones. vacuum tube was essential for amplifications (no-one knew exactly how they worked!). required red hot wire and burned out. needed something more reliable -- AT&T started development of transistor. Along the way, Nobel Prizes at Bell Labs (Davisson).

R&D started in late 1930's but wouldn't have started w/o development of Quantum Mechanics. By 1930, a theory for properties of atoms started being applied to condensed matter systems, e.g. Bloch waves. With better understanding of electron transport, maybe we can understand materials well enough that we can make a transistor.

It's unlikely that the transistor could have been invented w/o theoretical underpinning. Same for laser. This is why it's important to invest in basic science.

Batteries! No major change in technology since 1850 (only factor of 2). Big breakthrough by sony with Li-Ion battery - factor of 2 since 2000. Discussion of LBNL technology to improve battery performance. Co block polymer that self-assembles and prevents dendrites from forming and making shorts. 2x energy density of current LiIon. Bad at low temperatures. Instead of trying to fine tune old recipe, a new idea.

New batteries for plug in hybrids, perhaps in 5 years. Lots of smart people now spending time on this.

Moore's law curve of $/MWh vs. Megawatts installed. Factor of 10 between gas turbines and photovoltaics. Need major improvement in PV for it to be viable. DOE predicts parity by 2030. Right now a factor of 5 difference w/o all the subsidies.

"We need transformative solutions to solve the energy problem"

nanotech for producing solar cells.

Population issue? Paul Erlich predicted 100's of millions dying in the 1970's and 1980's. Productivity of land grew while land used stayed constant. 1970 nobel prize on dwarf strains of wheat. Improve food production per acre 3-6x. Also mentioned Haber's invention of artificial fertilizer at turn of century (Nobel prize!). Bosch got another prize for efficient production of ammonia. Another prize for figuring out how it worked. Science coming to the rescue, at least temporarily.

We need science to come to the rescue.

Feedstock grass can produce 1/2 current consumption of gasoline via ethanol. 15x more efficient than corn.But we may need to invent an artificial plant...

Man first learned to fly by imitating nature. Leonardo invented plane by copying how birds flew. In this respect, Leonardo was a theorist.

Wright brothers had a hybrid solution: replaced muscle power with gasoline engine, but took features from bird wings. Now jets look nothing like birds. Also don't act like birds (e.g. mate and produce new little 747's).

Because you have access to materials not found in nature, can do better than nature (e.g. jet blades are single crystals!)

Can develop more efficient means of photosynthesis (Helios project).

This is part of the challenge.

And finally something else: funding increases for national labs, but how do we best organize assault on energy problem. Mentioning manhattan project and radar -- teams working hard to solve a problem. Bell labs -- strong individuals self-organizing into teams. Nobel prizes at Bell Labs.

There is no equivalent to Xerox PARC or Bell Labs in energy sector. National labs need to develop ideas that will be picked up by private sector.

- What about nuclear technology which can already now solve the problem? SC thinks NE is part of the energy mix. Compared to fossil fuels, no carbon emission. Of course waste & proliferation but they can be overcome. Some stimulus money for nuclear energy in ARRA. Should restart nuclear industry- Nick Samios: part of Bell Labs was from monopoly power. Can there be regulations or incentives to revive basic research in industrial complex in the US. SC says this was part of BHO's announcement today, the R&E tax credit which needs to be made permanent. US is losing technologies to companies overseas. Need to recapture technologies by exploiting scientific lead and incentives to companies to say that we want these to be home-grown industries.- How will ARPA-E (energy DARPA to invest in high risk things the private sector won't) being incorporated into DOE structure? Discussing conservatism of academics who need to keep their contracts renewed. So need something to encourage high risk research. He wants a lean organization: 20 people, $200M/year. No constraints. Describing his experience developing atomic fountains into better clocks using air force money (lots of money, but limited duration).- NY Times reporter (Andrew C. Revkin) applicability of something makes an easy sell. how do you communicate energy/climate problem in a way that gets the same outcome. current R&D is $1B/year where war on cancer etc is 10's of $B/year. Times reporter is videotaping SC's answer! SC makes a comment that people often go to war for energy resources so it makes it crucial to act quickly. Also pace of climate change is worrying. Skeptics say that southern hemiphere is cooling down -- but this was predicted in climate models. Difference between now and ice age is 6 degrees C. 5-6 degrees hotter would make a dramatically different world. He sees people being motivated to go into science for this reason.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Now I know we all like Animal Collective, right? What I hadn't realized about their new album was that the cover (difficult to see on web pages etc.) was an eye-popping optical illusion ("based on the works of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka" whose illusion page is wild). But, oddly enough, I only figured this out after writing a little ROOT macro to reproduce it (don't ask -- I had one of those "*I* could do that" moments...). After a bit of messing about to get it to look just like the original, and expanding its size to fill my laptop screen, it started moving. If you're a ROOT user, give it a try (and it makes things that look like this).